


Dreams of Paracelsus

by fresne



Category: The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2830631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Were a gnome of earth to be imprisoned, she'd but smile and wait. The earth was made to wait and slowly shift over millennium. For a salamander of fire, no such thing would ever occur. Her rage would be so instant, so burning, she'd consume any who dared so much as look at her or else die trying. For an undine of water, she'd surge and if barred by one route, she'd seek another. Oh, water could be contained, but whether she turned into vapor, or she froze and melted to crack any surface, she'd be free again.</p><p>Ariel was a sylph of air.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams of Paracelsus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessalae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessalae/gifts).



Were a gnome of earth to be imprisoned, she'd but smile and wait. The earth was made to wait and slowly shift over millennium. For a salamander of fire, no such thing would ever occur. Her rage would be so instant, so burning, she'd consume any who dared so much as look at her or else die trying. For an undine of water, she'd surge and if barred by one route, she'd seek another. Oh, water could be contained, but whether she turned into vapor, or she froze and melted to crack any surface, she'd be free again.

Ariel was a sylph of air. She'd been created upon the currents of the sky. She'd tasted the stars' dust as they plummeted to earth and wafted blue clouds that glowed like the ember of a salamander's last satisfied gasp into the highest heaven of the celestial spheres. She was that which no man noticed the presence of, but surely all realized her absence. She loved to sing in the leaves of swaying trees. "When I do twisting spin the falling leaves, I but herald winter for the trees." She'd puff her yellow cheeks and laughing blow. Her short stiff red hair went in all directions like a dandelion's seeds.

Upon her last day of freedom, she spent it racing unhindered across the sea and land. 

She spent it roaring and blustering up Undine spray. Ahava of the water splashed up glistening beads that glittered in the light and fell back to join the sea. Together they opened up the ocean's blue fathoms to share a glimpse and fling sheer green waves into the sky. They made clouds gauzy and sweet that gently rained upon the green land.

She whistled down red gnome valleys where ages of her kind had carved at stone. Tlalli grinned multicolored teeth and pushed up at the roots of the mountains while Ariel whistled falling snow onto their jagged tips.

She spent it pushing, pushing, pushing at a salamander's flame. Adara roared a forest fire that Ariel raced ahead of her gusts. Together they burned and great clouds of billowing black smoke brushed the sky and crossing the sea was consumed by the leaves of grapes that added that smoke to their vintage. The ashes they left grew from fire baked seeds into a new forest.

She circled the earth many times on the last day she was free and so that day was many days. 

But eventually even gusts slip into breezes and then into the still quiet of a moonless night upon an island in the midst of the wine dark sea.

She drifted about that island until she heard a call that she could not resist. It was her name. It was her nature. She was very curious. It was so that she came to meet the blue eyed witch, Sycorax, her belly already round with child from the two-backed beast she'd made with a stony Troll beneath his bridge. Or else the two fronted creature she'd made kneeling before a fiery genie in the sands of Argiers. Or else the four legged animal she'd made with a watery kelpie in his river that cut through the land. 

Sycorax lifted her hands in to the air and sparks crackled from them with the words of binding that she spoke in the ancient language of the Aether that weaves all things. She said, "Ariel, my child, my greatest creation but lacks one element. That brilliant spark that comes of sky. I have these long months pursued you with belled out sails upon my ship. Until it seemed that a wiser course was not to pit myself against where you are strong, but rather to wait on this island where all that is magic come to rest. I command you lie down upon this shore and let us make a four armed chimera and breed a child fit to rule the world."

Ariel shook the gusts of her head. Around her the magic of the island stood strange frozen, waiting. "Sycorax, command me to level a city, and I must do it. Command me to lift up the sea to reveal the sunken ship's treasures that there rest. Command me to lift you up and carry you to the corners of the earth, and I must do it. But I am no Angel to lie with a woman and make a Nephilim. I am no sprite to couple with you and create the spark of inspiration. I am a sylph. I am that which gives birth to these. I cannot do what you ask."

Sycorax raised her hands again. "I command you, lie down and give me the spark of genius for my child." 

Ariel shook her head once again. "Command me to bring you such a creature and I can do it. There are sprites more than willing to do such a deed. There are fallen angels with broken wings who'd gladly exchange a day of flight for such a task."

Sycorax gestured to the shadows that lurked behind her in the dark of the moon. Shadowed shapes that in earlier ages had once cast off light by simply being and strode the star roads at the Aether's bidding, but in pride broke their own wings. In arrogance, they became not black, which is but the absorption of all light, but the emptiness that is the absence of light. They were the dead light where stars once shone and no good could come from them. Sycorax said, "I already have a legion of such at my command as given me by my god, Setebos. I give you one more chance, Ariel of the air. Lie down with your back to the earth and finish my child."

Wild current crackling through her veins, Ariel shook her head a third time. "I cannot."

"So, be it," said Sycorax. She snapped her fingers and the darkness surged forward. 

Ariel was pinned and twisted within a cloven pine. Within whose rift, she could hear Sycorax coupling with some member of her legion. She could hear Sycorax's pleasured cries as she completed her creation. She heard also her less pleasured ones as she pushed that child forth. 

Trapped and twisted within that tree, Ariel moaned and shook and rattled, but Sycorax only laughed. Ariel begged through the wood. She begged through the pitch of pine. "Please, free me. You have your child." 

She heard with dread the catching cough to Sycorax's voice. "Yes, and I will give my boy the world without your help." 

Ariel knew what that cough meant. A human might, for a time, wield the power of the Aether's word and command the magic of the spinning spheres, but human bodies were not meant to contain such power. Ariel whispered to herself, "And that is why you made a child, who could bear it for you." She raised her voice. "You are dying, Sycorax. But free me, and I will raise your child to adult years with all the buried wisdom of the world." Ariel said and then she screamed it, rattling at the pine tree painfully pinching her airy limbs into a single twisted shape. 

Sycorax laughed and it was a hollow sound. "If you'd a hand in creating this child, I'd let you go with a will. But you had none, and therefore will have none." 

Through the scratching bark, Ariel could hear Sycorax coo to her child, Caliban. She could hear her coo and whisper dreams of hurting all those who had hurt Sycorax. Ariel screamed and begged as she heard that child take its first step and climb in the very branches of where she was trapped. She called out as she heard Sycorax rattle her last breath and the screams of Caliban echoed through the still magic of the island. 

Twelve long years, Ariel was twisted into that tree. When little Caliban grubbed at her feet for berries or nuts, she pleaded with him, but he had no speech. Sycorax's greatest creation and he could not understand her.

She might have hated him, but a sylph is not a salamander or a gnome. Sylphs cling to nothing. A sylph longs only for one thing. 

A branch of that tree cracked open and she sprang forth into the light and joy and free spinning of air, and heard once more the command of Aether, this time wielded by a small man, who would have been well placed running a small butcher's shop or bakery, perhaps reading by candlelight. He was wrapped all over in a tangled net that fallow eyes might see only as a simple cord, but she saw was a web of power. He held in his hand a magician's staff and in his other, a small child. He said, "I am Prospero, your Master. If you do my bidding, I will eventually free you. Now bring us food." The magic of the island went from stillness to sudden spinning at his words. A whirl of motion that she could not more resist than it could.

She whisked to the court of the King of France and took up his entire banquet table, subtlety and all. There was a salamander depicted as burning quietly on the golden plates. She bowed to Prospero. "Here is your food. Now free me to race the wind. Let me expand into the sky."

Prospero placed his child upon the table and let her sleep a moment longer amid the feast. "Do you want to go back in the tree? If not, then do not ask when you will be free. I will free you when I am ready and that is not now."

Ariel itched. She longed to race across the world. The wind was whistling high in the sky and somewhere a star was falling. Still, she said, "There is a child already on this island. Caliban, the son of Sycorax, the witch, who imprisoned me. He does not know human speech and eats what he can find. You can teach him to be your servant. Shall I bring him to you?"

"Yes," Prospero liked the idea. He scratched the side of his nose, "and books. My brother only put a few of my books of magic on our boat. Enough to bring us to this load stone of magic. This ancient place where the Aether once set down a foot. Bring the boy, and then books of magic." He looked thoughtful. "No, first a palace, I need some place to live." The magic of the island whirled in quick tearing turns at his words.

She brought him a palace from Morocco with a gnome's shapes in the decorations and the boy living on the rocks on the far side of the island and all the books in the Monastery of Kells that had to do with magic.

Of Caliban, Prospero made a servant. Oh, he taught him speech enough, and as Prospero taught his child, Miranda, to read, so he shared some of that gift with Caliban. But Sycorax had crafted ill when she made Caliban for the spark of air that she'd used had no spark. 

Ariel was too busy at Propero's commands to exchange more than a glancing pinch with the boy and then the man. While Miranda never even knew Ariel existed. That girl saw the world with fallow eyes and never saw the still magic all around her.

Ariel gusted about the earth gathering what her Master commanded, but never at her own will. She battered apart the volcanic rock that hid the golden books of the sorcerers of Sicily or dived deep into the ocean to find the magic crystals of Atlantis, or treated with the Fairies of Athens for certain ingredients that they knew. But it was not to her bidding. It was not to the working of the world. It was to the whims of a small man wrapped in a net as he made notes about passages in certain books.

If he'd wielded the magic like breathing, he might have lasted a year or so as that magic battered him. But though he was a duke and well educated at that, his aims were small. If he had been a monk in a monastery, he'd have been better suited. If he'd been such a monk, Ariel would be in her tree prison still.

Sometimes, she said, "Let me carry you someplace where there are people. You have the means already to rule them. Then you can free me."

He would glare at her, her Master, her Prospero, from beetling brows and berate her for asking. He threatened, he always threatened, to plug her once more into a tree. An oak this time, as if trading an oak for a pine would grant a difference to limbs meant to graze the highest sky.

Still, he commanded and the magic jumped and whirled. Lifted her up and spun her. Consumed at him, until she could see death waiting in his eyes. Still, he did not understand, with his eyes firmly in his books, until he heard Caliban attempt to violate the honor of Miranda. That's how Prospero put it. Not violate her body, or violate her trust, or love of the only other being on the island with time for games. He called it violating her honor, and commanded Ariel give the brute a hundred lashes of the trees. He commanded Ariel confine the brute to some rocks on the far side of the island.

Prospero crouched at he commanded it and held up his finger at Ariel, while around them the magic of the island spun and whirled in accordance with Prospero's command. She ignored that finger, for such was not her nature to stop her whistle. She said, "When will you give me my liberty?" If he died before he spoke the word, then she'd be confined to the space of the island. Hardly more space to stretch than a tree. She'd whirl and spin, shaking at her prison until she stripped every blade of grass from the land. Prospero had the learning to know it, but he did not command her to lift Miranda to some safe space. Rather he threatened her with a tree and set in motion some petty revenge.

His bones were turning into coral and pearl dimmed the vision of his eyes. Fire was in his blood and hurricanes in his coughs. He was for the earth, but he held onto his staff. She wondered at her Master. Affection and gusted frustration in her thoughts.

Finally, he gave her his last charge. To carry his burial barge back to his kingdom, to be his for a day or two before the magic consumed him. Even snapped from the weft of his cast aside net and the bend of his staff, it was too late for anything but to give his daughter to an utter stranger, if a prince, with love and with no greater notion of how to behave in the places of power than a flower might. 

Still, Ariel puffed her cheeks and blew the ship to its harbor. 

On her first day of freedom, she tasted it on the wind. She expanded into the air and kissed the very curve of the celestial spheres. She embraced a star as it fell and cast the blue glowing clouds that might form an angel if exposed to enough starlight. She whistled through the green forest that had grown where a fire once burned. She called out to her sister breezes. She sang to the trees. She made a monsoon with Ahava of the sea and she settled snow upon Tlalli's mountain. She found Adara sleeping in a volcano and left her to her rest. 

She thought to check in on Miranda, but it had been a very long day, and that young woman had grown old and died, as humans will. Caliban was still on the magic island. He growled to see her. She whistled a tune and said, "You've known what it is to be a prisoner."

He howled his answer. He'd been alone with the magic a very long time. She held her finger up to her lips, for sylphs do know how to be still from time to time. He quieted. She slipped a finger through his ear and into his mind. In the darkness there, she gently blew a spark. 

"Ah!" he said, and understood. He spun slowly and quick, quick, as Aether does, which sometimes is called magic.

She lofted him past the heavens to do what deeds Aether does beyond the spheres and continued her way around the world for her day was not done.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


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